Punjab Assembly: Budget passed without a hitch, finance bill today

Treasury votes down Opp cut-motions as PPP, Unification Bloc abstain.

LAHORE:

The treasury benches defeated six opposition cut-motions and passed the 2011-12 budget statement on Wednesday. The government is to present the Finance Bill in the Punjab Assembly today (Thursday).

The approved annual budget statement carried 43 demands for grants and was worth Rs654.74 billion. Six motions to cut funding for the police, health, education, state trading in food grains and sugar, agriculture and general administration were defeated.

Under the Constitution of Pakistan, the assembly must approve the budget documents and then the Finance Bill. Together they constitute the Money Bill, which once signed by the governor becomes an Act.

The Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) opposed the demands for grants and presented six cut-motions. PML-Q dissidents in the Unification Bloc and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) supported the budget by abstaining from the vote on the cut-motions, thus allowing the treasury benches to pass the budget easily.

Speaking to The Express Tribune later, Mohsin Leghari of the PML-Q said that the speaker had not been asked to divide the house during the voting  so that it would be clear how the Unification Bloc dissidents vote – because the PPP had refused to present the demand as a joint opposition request. According to the Constitution, a parliamentarian that votes against their party on a money bill is liable to be disqualified.

He said that if the speaker had agreed to divide the house, the PML-Q would have sought to disqualify the Unification Bloc members. “The government will pass the finance bill in the same way,” he said.

Leader of the Opposition Raja Riaz said that President Asif Zardari had instructed the PPP to vote for the budget. The party wanted to avoid “the politics of turncoats”, he said, adding that they would vote for the Finance Bill too.

PML-Q parliamentary leader Chaudhry Zaheeruddin, speaking on the cut-motion on agriculture, said that during this government’s three-and-a-half years in power, wheat production had fallen by 0.5 percent, other grains by 30 per cent, rice by 8 per cent, cotton by 10 per cent and maize by 5 per cent. The population, meanwhile, had gone up by over 10 million.

Agriculture Minister Ahmad Ali Aulakh pointed out that the previous government’s allocations to agriculture of Rs712 million in 2004-2005, Rs925 million in 2005-2006 and Rs1,100 million in 2006-2007 was dwarfed by the 2011-12 allocation of Rs3.40 billion.

Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif responded to criticism from PML-Q legislator Seemal Kamran concerning funding for the Chand Bagh School, saying the school taught orphans and the poor.

He said that his government had allocated taxpayers’ money for projects exclusively for the poor. He said that the PML-Q government had allocated Rs200 million for the Beaconhouse School System in 2007-2008, Rs500 million for the Lahore University of Management Sciences in 2006-2007, Rs100 million for Rawalpindi Gymkhana and Rs50 million for Lahore Gymkhana in previous years.

Zaheeruddin said that the Punjab Assembly had approved billions of rupees for various projects in three years but he had not seen the province benefit from any project. He said that if the previous government had wasted taxpayers’ money, it was nothing compared to the losses from the Sasti Roti Scheme, Food Support Programme and “roads leading to Raiwind”.

Riaz said the PML-N had humiliated a national institution with its recent criticism of the army. “We will help you if you want revenge against [Gen (r) Pervez] Musharraf, but please don’t malign the whole army,” he said.



Published in The Express Tribune, June 23^rd, 2011.